Hi,
Welcome back to Continue Watching! We know we’ve been missing from your inbox for over two months, and the fact that some of you noticed and reached out to check in filled us both with equal amounts of gratitude and surprise. That this little corner of the internet where two grumpy, tired, cynical women write about feeling all the feels while watching TV holds any kind of value in your life boggles our mind and makes us giddy with happiness. We love you and we love this newsletter, which is why even though life has not eased up on us, we came back here because IT’S OUR SECOND BIRTHDAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
Can you believe this? The last two years have challenged us, just like the rest of the world, in unimaginable ways. We’ve navigated through job changes, moving cities, COVID waves, and devastating tragedies in this time, and yet, every 15 days we have thought about you and this newsletter, even if only to eventually tell each other that we are coming up empty on ideas. You are the biggest blessing of our life, one that happened through Continue Watching, second only to our friendship that has now reached soulmates level.
Right, so that’s enough sappiness for one issue! For this special birthday newsletter, we are bringing to you the top five TV shows that we will recommend to everyone without any hesitation, which means that you will get to see the five shows that have basically defined our adulthood and shaped our personalities. If you pay close attention to the protagonists of some of these shows, you might be able to put together a rough personality of each of us, and if you’re surprised by how dysfunctional it seems, then you’ve hit the bull's eye! Fair warning that there are some surprises in our lists.
We’d also love to hear about your Top Five, so please feel free to write in to us so we can discuss the common ones till kingdom come and add the others to our aggressively long to-watch list. We’ve both been a little freaked out lately by our inability to watch anything consistently or engage with it in a meaningful manner, so maybe this will be the push we need. That doesn’t mean we aren’t watching anything though (it never does), so here’s what we’re busy with these days.
CURRENTLY WATCHING
Kashika
The Bear: I am obsessed with stories of people who go to big cities to do big things but then have to come back to their hometowns for reasons and struggle to adjust and adapt because they have changed and the city has changed and everyone in it has changed. What can I say? I love projecting. The Bear is about hot chef Carmy, who inherits his brother’s sandwich shop after the brother’s death and has to come back to Chicago to run it even though he was the next big thing in New York. It’s physically and emotionally messy and super chaotic, but that’s the kind of energy we’re all living our lives with in 2022, so it is the perfect show for these times. You just know that if you were to meet a Carmy IRL, he’d be the biggest asshole and you would still fall in love with him in every universe. Please watch this so we can discuss it until season two releases. Streaming nowhere.
The Summer I Turned Pretty: Based on the books by Jenny Han, who also wrote the To All The Boys series, The Summer I Turned Pretty is so aggressively plain and cliched, that there’s something incredibly reassuring about it. There is no plot point that you don’t see coming from a mile away and that really grounded me in a week where nothing was making sense to me. The story is about Belly, a 16-year-old who has suddenly turned pretty and is now caught in a love triangle between two brothers who are also her childhood friends. This is a show we have all seen a hundred times, and will continue to see a hundred more times. Streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
—
Shahana
Becoming Elizabeth: As has been said a million times before on Continue Watching, if a period show exists, Shahana will watch it. And especially if it’s about Elizabeth Tudor (who, along with her mother, are among women in history I am obsessed with). Becoming Elizabeth delves into the royal drama that took place after 14-year-old Elizabeth’s father Henry VIII dies, leaving his nine-year-old son Edward VI to rule. And so begins the Tudor version of the Game of Thrones, as different people at court vie to pick their fighter for control of the throne. A good show about royals is a seamless combination of family drama and political strategy, and this one seems to have both. Watching young Elizabeth learn about the politics that involve life at court and among powerful men, and teach herself exactly how to navigate both and come out on top is interesting and scintillating; for anyone wondering why she was so decidedly against marriage, her adolescence and the way men treated her in those formative years will explain it. Streaming on Lionsgate Play.
Irma Vep: Irma Vep is an unusual show, and I’m a little confused about how to describe it. Basic plot is this: Alicia Vikander stars as Mira, an actress known for being in successful commercial films, who heads to Paris to be in some sort of arty show and play an evil, seductive muse to a group of vampire criminals. Yeah I know it sounds weird, but oddly, it all works. Irma Vep seems to be a delightful satire of the film industry, and without saying much, says plenty about cinema and the inherent struggle of trying to match creativity with commerce. Irma Vep tries to create an Upstairs-Downstairs version of show business—actors who want to both money and roles that fulfil them, producers weighed down by financial concerns who couldn’t care less about artistry, Hollywood agents pushing for female Silver Surfer roles (yeah, it’s a thing), production staff sourcing drugs for kooky actors, various romantic subplots. I will probably have to watch till the end to figure out exactly how I feel about Irma Vep, but in the meantime, if you want to chat about it, reply to us here. Streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.
Listen, we know we said that we’re not watching much these days but there are three things we HAVE to tell you.
1. The Handmaid's Tale’s season five teaser is out. Shahana will definitely watch it because she hates herself. Kashika noped out of the show after season one.
2. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power trailer is also out. Shahana will watch this too because she loves LOTR. Kashika would rather eat glass.
3. All the discourse about the new Persuasion movie is correct, it is indeed very bad. So bad that we’re putting this in our TV newsletter. The tweet that said Dakota Johnson has a face that knows what a cellphone looks like is 100% right. If people want to watch an irreverent period comedy, they should watch The Great, streaming nowhere but you know what to do about that after two years, we’re sure 😉
We’re a little nervous about this issue because we’re slightly out of practice, so we hope you enjoy it. Once again, thank you so much for reading and watching with us, for writing to us, for telling us in person how much you love this newsletter. We’re always shook that you take the time out to read what we write. Have a great weekend, we’re almost there!
Continue Watching (and reading!),
Kashika and Shahana
Shahana’s Top 5 TV Shows Of All Time That Everyone Should Watch
Arranged in order of release, not preference (I don’t have one, I love them all equally)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003)
“If the apocalypse comes, beep me.”
Buffy the Vampire Slayer released back in 1997, but 25 years later, the equal parts funny and tragic seven-season run that combined both pop culture and literary conceits remains unmatched. Based on a film of the same name that few people watched and even fewer people liked, BtVS follows the life of high school student Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) who moves to pretty Sunnydale. Inverting the classic horror film standard, the pretty blonde doesn't die and instead, turns out to be character that makes it to the end—the one-in-every-generation girl fated to be the vampire slayer and fulfil her world-saving destiny by killing various evil supernatural creatures that are drawn to the Hellmouth, on top of which Sunnydale sits. She's helped by friends—nerdy Willow (Alyson Hannigan), hopelessly normal and lame Xander (Nicholas Brendon), cool werewolf Oz (Seth Green), demon Anya (Emma Caulfield), lover and vampire-with-a-soul, Angel (David Boreanaz), and her paternal but staid mentor Giles (Anthony Stuart Head). She faces and has to take down the Sid and Nancy of vampires, Spike and Drusilla, different monsters every week, as well as an overarching Big Bad.
While I started watching it as a fan of the genre, I stayed for everything else. For the first time, I was being told that it was possible to be “tough” and “badass” and be soft, pretty, and overwhelmingly feminine—that I could be taken seriously even in a skirt and heels. (Do I hate that my first lesson in feminism came to me from Joss Whedon? Yes, absolutely. Whedon did horrible things to the women on his sets, and he should never ever set foot on a set or sell a screenplay again). I stayed for the way BtVS managed to blend comedy, action, horror, and drama and do it in a way that felt completely natural. I stayed for the masterfully-laid plots and the superb payoffs, the fighting, the laughter, the camaraderie, the grief, the love and pain that came with the loss of it, the joy that came with winning, the hopelessness that came with losing, and the glory of it all.
Over seven seasons, BtVS progressively gets darker and more adult, as the characters themselves grow up and head to college and live lives beyond high school. Buffy and her friends all grew into their roles, as we grew into our personalities and our places in the world, parleying with the new complexities, freedoms, and responsibilities adulthood offered.
BtVS on the surface may seem like an infantile show about a plucky girl and her friends killing vampires, but it was far more mature. Between episodes that were pure fun, like 'Band Candy', where the adults eat magical sweets and revert to their adolescent selves, there was also 'The Body', where [SPOILER ALERT] Buffy's mother Joyce dies, leaving the young girl to deal with the fact that she could defeat monsters five times stronger than her, but was powerless in front of death. And then there was the utterly campy 'Once More With Feeling', a musical (there's a monster involved, trust me) that seemed lighthearted but hits you with a heartbreaking reveal at the end that is the TV equivalent of a sucker punch, amid 'Hush', an episode with almost no dialogue, that still manages to be one of the most terrifying, raising questions about whether society can function when communication breaks down.
While BtVS has its blind spots—it killed its gays and lacks diversity—it was also a show that gave us a lot. It centered a wide range of female characters without sidelining the male, imbuing each character with both tenderness and complexity. BtVS is a cult classic, and for good reason.
Rating: 4/5, Streaming nowhere (an absolute tragedy)
Kashika’s take: I feel terrible every time I say this, but I haven’t watched Buffy. The only TV vampires I care about are Stefan Salvatore, Caroline Forbes, and Katerina Petrova. But two of my dearest friends, apart from Shahana, also swear by Buffy so I tried watching it once and absolutely could not get past the hilariously bad CGI of episode one. It’s still on my list though!
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005-present)
“Science is a liar sometimes.”
The simplest way to describe It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is that it's about a group of irredeemable, loathsome, borderline alcoholics we would actively hate if we knew them in real life, who own and run Paddy's Pub, an Irish dive bar in Philadelphia.
For those who don't already love the show, Sunny's deliberately caustic tone can make it a little tough to get on board, but its irreverent worldview is perhaps the very reason it works—it's a little too in tune with the times we live in. Fifteen seasons in, this group of assholes—easily angered Mac (Rob McElhenney), psychopath Dennis (Glenn Howerton), vain Dee (Kaitlin Olson), too-dumb-to-be-alive Charlie (Charlie Day) and depraved patriarch Frank (Danny DeVito) — plumbing the depths of human behaviour has managed to develop a cult following.
What I love about Sunny is how it manages to match its singular dedication to retaining its lawless outlook on the world, along with maintaining that same cynical tone towards its characters. On most other sitcoms, characters mature and develop as seasons progress; on Sunny, they actively get worse and even more unpleasant. Every time I think they can’t go lower, the Gang proves that they can. In the times we live in, Sunny's writing then seems oddly prescient; given the persistent sense of doom that hangs around the social, political, and literal climate of 2019 (if you don’t live with the lingering feeling that everything is going to come crashing down any second, please get in touch so I can be you), is it any surprise that a show that celebrates misery resonates with so many?
People who don’t like Sunny's pessimistic outlook are usually glossing over the fact that the show actually contains a lot of depth under the griminess, and to them, I request a second watch. Sunny's leads are utter scum, which allows the writers to use them to pick apart sensitive topics most other shows will tiptoe around. In 'The Gang Gets Racist,' Charlie attempts to prove he's not racist—by literally playacting the “I have lots of Black friends” trope. In pretending to have a moral void, they're able to make very perceptive and shrewd observations on race, gender, sexual harassment, fake news, and sexuality. The best thing about Sunny is that, even amidst its scuzzy exterior, it manages to find a space for sensitivity—in 'Mac Finds His Pride', [SPOILER ALERT] Mac comes out as gay to his stoic, traditionally masculine father in an emotionally fraught, modern dance piece. Somehow, it makes sense. Somehow, it fits.
In the 17 years that it's been on air, Sunny's strength has lain in how it managed to adapt, both to changes in the milieu and to what its viewers would find funny. Sunny has stayed edgy, reckoning with its own past as it looks to the future. When Sunny embraces the fact that the world may be moving on, leaving people like Mac, Charlie, Dee, Dennis, and Frank behind, turning their buffoonery into a commentary on those who identify with the Gang, we can perhaps end the day with a bit of hope. And if not, there's always Paddy's.
Rating: 4/5, Streaming on Disney+ Hotstar
Kashika’s take: Ugh, yet another highly-rated cult classic that I haven’t watched. Two friends on two separate occasions have tried to get me into Sunny, but I’m sorry I just can’t. If I can’t root for you, I can’t watch you on TV.
Fleabag (2016-2019)
“Hair is everything.”
Fleabag’s second season opens with Fleabag (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) in an elegant black jumpsuit washing her hands. The camera pans up, and we see her face, covered in blood. Unconcerned, she uses a napkin to blot at the blood and hands another to a woman sprawled on the floor. She looks into the camera, at us, and says: “This is a love story.”
Within the first minute, Fleabag sets the tone for the rest of the season. In the world of Fleabag, love exists alongside pain, and there is no one without the other.
Season one Fleabag’s fourth wall break felt more like a creative choice; we’re disarmed by the caustic humour, her witty asides. There’s a secret, and we’re the only ones party to it. She chooses to tell only us, and we’re special. It doesn’t take long to figure her out—Fleabag uses us as a crutch. She is deceptively honest, offering us risqué details about her sex life, her wry observations on everyone else, all while she artfully conceals just how broken and lonely she is. With the deflection, she prevents us from really seeing her; if we don’t see her for the “greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman” she thinks she is, then she isn’t those things. If we believe she’s funny, witty, sexually-liberated, and cool, then she can delude herself into thinking she is all those things. Fleabag dissociates every time she has to deal with something she’d rather not. Often, while she indulges in bad behaviour, she includes us in it. And because we can’t answer, we become complicit. She comes to us because we can’t judge, and therefore she doesn’t have to either. We are not confidantes, we are armour.
But what does Fleabag do when someone else refuses to let her leave, who makes the effort to see who she is, and then, instead of validating what she believes, that she’s unworthy of love, chooses to love her and stay? In season two [SPOILER], when The Priest sees her leave him to come to us, he asks her where she went, and in a later scene even follows her into the fourth wall break. She tries to shrug it off, but he won’t let her. For the first time in Fleabag’s life, someone sees her.
At the center of Fleabag is one fundamental question—how do we keep ourselves open to loving and being loved, when the cost can be so intensely painful? The cost of being vulnerable, of seeing yourself reflected in someone else’s eyes, laid bare? Of finding safety, a place to rest, of finding home—and then it being wrenched away?
When talking about Fleabag, I find that I tend to use passive words, rarely describing what about Fleabag calls out to me personally. It’s likely that I recognise the deflection and the fear. The Priest says later, “love isn’t something that weak people do” and Fleabag embodies that lesson—that being a romantic takes hope. And if Fleabag, broken as she is, could turn tragedy into hope, perhaps so can I.
Rating: 4/5, Streaming on Amazon Prime Video
Kashika’s take: First of all, there’s nothing left to say about the show for me now because Shahana has written a goddamn Oscar-worthy mini essay on it. I did not enjoy season one that much, but season two is an all-time great. What struck me the most about it is how absolutely nothing gets okay or resolved in the end, and the show is not coming back for another season, and yet you know that Fleabag will be okay. And so will you.
Be Melodramatic 멜로가 체질 (2019)
“I’m having a tough time. Hug me.”
Be Melodramatic might be the most personal entry of all the shows in this list—it came to me when I desperately needed it, and I ended up discovering one of the most criminally underrated shows ever. Don't let the name fool you—Be Melodramatic is a show about perfectly ordinary people, living perfectly ordinary lives.
Anchored around a female ensemble cast, it focuses on the daily joys and struggles of three friends who all work in different arenas of the entertainment industry. Drama writer Im Jin-joo (Chun Woo-hee) who hopes to someday see her own script produced, as she works as an assistant writer for Jeong Hye-jeong (Baek Ji-won), one of the top screenwriters in the industry. Documentary maker Lee Eun-jung (Jeon Yeo-bin) whose life has practically come to a standstill after a tragedy, and marketing head Hwang Han-joo (Han Ji-eun), who is learning to find a balance between her recent promotion and being a single mother. While the drama focuses on the three women, the trio is surrounded by fully developed characters with their own arcs—their family, colleagues, friends.
If you're looking for a show with a lot of physical action, this isn't it. The plot, however, never meanders or slows down; plenty happens, it just reflects in the way the characters grow and develop, and in their conversations with themselves and each other. The trio live in Eun-jung's apartment, after she suffers a devastating loss, one she is unable to grieve. Eun-jung is severely depressed, and after some time, seems to recover...but not entirely. Eun-jung is there, and also isn't; she smiles, laughs, gets drunk with friends, does her chores, goes about her life, but she also isn't quite present. I've seen plenty of depictions in popular culture about grief and mental illness, but rarely have I seen this version of it—Eun-jung's inability to ask for help because she couldn't and wouldn't process her grief or even understand it.
Not everyone on the show has a storyline as heavy as Eun-jung's, but they're just as compelling. And this is why Be Melodramatic is special—it manages to treat every single character with care and empathy, giving even minor characters rich stories, so every action has context.
Single mother Han-joo is fiercely independent, and Be Melodramatic never whitewashes her sacrifices or the stress involved in raising a child alone (though she does have help). But she isn't reduced to just her identity as a single mom, she's a complete person, pursuing friendships and relationships not related to her child, as well as a career.
Be Melodramatic deals with heavy subjects—grief, sexism, loneliness, love, relationships, sexuality, intolerance, professional and personal insecurities, and despite it, still weaves together humour with sadness—you will find yourself laughing out loud quite often, and Be Melodramatic never cheapens a quiet or fraught moment with an unnecessary joke. That's just the way life goes, we laugh, we cry, sometimes at the same time, and when the jokes come, they serve as a reminder: past the edge of every cold winter lies spring.
Rating: 4/5, Streaming on Netflix
Kashika’s take: Shahana has told me to watch this show many times, and it says a lot about me that I’ve started and abandoned it twice because I have the attention span of a baby. This description is making me want to give it another shot!
I May Destroy You (2020)
“Your birth is my birth, your death is my death.”
In ‘Someone Is Lying’, I May Destroy You’s second episode, Arabella (Michaela Coel) sits in a police station, talking to two female police officers, trying to describe to them the memories of a fuzzy night, clouded by drugs. Arabella believes she was roofied, and she recounts an image that keeps replaying in her mind—a man’s face, sweating, panting, in a bathroom stall. “Who is he looking at?” one of the police women asks. Arabella, who all this time has been flippant and blasé, crumbles, hiding her face in her sweater while a sob forces its way out of her.
This is the scene that sets the tone of I May Destroy You for me. No matter what walls you put up between yourself and the thing that hurt you, it will make its way out. Violations, both big and small, demand to be felt. IMDY begins with Arabella’s life torn apart by a sexual assault, one she at first tries to push down and failing that, force herself through the trauma the best she can. IMDY is a difficult show to watch—it looks unflinchingly at sexual assault while talking about consent, keeping just enough humour to ensure it doesn’t turn into an unending pool of darkness.
IMDY is not a show about rape or sexual assault, but more about consent and all the ways we endure and survive the day-to-day violations. Every episode on IMDY explores a moment where a character’s consent is disregarded—some are clear, like when a man forces himself onto another person, and some are a little harder to catch. When Arabella’s friend Terry (Weruche Opia) finds out the spontaneous threesome she just had wasn’t exactly spontaneous, and that the men tricked her into thinking it was—what is it then?
It isn’t just the exploration of consent and the boundaries of sexual abuse that sets IMDY apart—it’s how IMDY centers its story around the survivor instead of the crime itself. We read about sexual assault so often that it feels like a blur, and IMDY forces us to confront the fact that the survivor is not a number, there is a real life, flesh-and-blood person, and they have to live with the aftermath long after we’ve moved on. Arabella doesn’t remember being raped, the details lost to a hazy memory. But she is assaulted again, and this time, she remembers it. This time, she gets to call him out—this time, she has the power. This time, she can get justice—but it does nothing to quell her emptiness.
IMDY can be a tough watch, but what makes it so is exactly the reason one should watch it. IMDY forces us to stay where the pain is, and the reason it’s so hard is because pain doesn’t ever go away. The survivor lives with it, the least we can do is to acknowledge and bear witness to it.
Rating: 4/5, Streaming on Disney+ Hotstar
Kashika’s take: I have no stomach for watching women be abused on screen anymore, and I May Destroy You was very uncomfortable for me to watch. I’m glad I did, though I will never watch it again.
Honourable mentions:
Good Girls Revolt (forever salty about it getting cancelled)
Hannibal
Sense8
Veronica Mars
Succession
Kashika’s Top 5 TV Shows Of All Time That Everyone Should Watch
In no particular order
Grey’s Anatomy — ONLY seasons 1-4 (2005-present)
“We're adults. When did that happen? And how do we make it stop?”
When someone talks about the perfect show, I think of the first four seasons of Grey’s. It’s a tragedy that now in its 18th season the show is absolutely unwatchable, but those initial years before everyone either died or left, this show was my Bible. We all know the story, but I’d recap it one more time. Meredith, Alex, George, Izzie, and Cristina are five interns in the surgical program of Seattle Grace Hospital, and while they’re learning to save lives, they’re also dealing with love, life, and loss. Just writing this is making me want to rewatch it. Every plot, including side plots with patients, is worthy of your time. Every dialogue is perfection, even the super dramatic ones. Every man is hot. I think the fact that I watched this show when I was 20 and entering a similarly competitive and grueling but far less important or life-changing profession (entertainment journalism) has something to do with how I imprinted on it. There is merit for me in understanding how or why I thought working like Cristina was a badge of honour and being “dark and twisty” like Meredith was A-okay, but it’s too late and this is my personality now. Sometimes when I say the word ‘seriously’, you can still hear Izzie in me.
Rating: 5/5, Streaming on Disney+ Hotstar
Shahana’s take: Like everyone else at the time, I too watched Grey’s Anatomy. However, I was also watching House, which seemed to just be more my thing, so I gave up after a few seasons. One of the only things I remember from Grey’s was hoping for a person, like Meredith had Cristina, and desperately wanting them to say “He is not the sun, you are,” and Kashika almost daily says something super romantic to me, so I guess I won.
Friday Night Lights (2008-2011)
“Well, you’re gonna win, or you’re gonna lose. Either way, the sun’s still gonna come up tomorrow morning.”
The trials and tribulations of a high school football team in small town Texas is not something that would ever appeal to me, but legend has it that if you say “clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose” to me on a bad (or rainy) day, I will burst into tears. Coach Taylor moves to Dillon, Texas, with his literal-definition-of-a-goddess wife Tami and whiny daughter Julie to coach their high school football team, which is made up of good players, about-to-be-good players, hot and broody Tim Riggins. Their struggles are never ending, which makes their wins even sweeter. Before I watched FNL, I did not know what people meant when they said that a show has so much heart. Also, Eric and Tami Taylor have the perfect TV marriage, and no one will ever come close. Not Randall and Beth, not Claire and Phil, not Jake and Amy, and no, not even Jack and Rebecca. There are some incredibly stupid plots in there which make no sense (looking at you season two), but what’s a teen show without some insanity?
Rating: 4.5/5, Streaming nowhere
Shahana’s take: This is 100% the kind of show I would’ve watched loved had I watched it in my teens, but sadly my roster was full with The OC, Veronica Mars, and One Tree Hill. I wish I could say I will watch this, but I really won’t.
Gilmore Girls (2000-2007)
“I'm fine. I'm just being dramatic. It's what I do.”
My problematic fave, Gilmore Girls is the first show I binge-watched. I started it when I was 16 (and Rory was 16) and now I’m 32 (the age Lorelai was when the show began). This has led to my brain short circuiting quite a few times this year, but despite its lack of diversity and mind-boggling fatphobia, Gilmore Girls remains my number 1 comfort watch (we do not consider the revival a part of the show). In fact, I secretly think that two big parts of my personality — talking fast and drinking coffee — only exist because I’ve watched this show seven times. I relate to absolutely nothing from the show — I am not a teen mom, my parents are not loaded or (as) controlling, I never wanted to study in any college as badly as Rory wanted to go to Harvard, I didn’t have 3 men always vying for my attention (or did I?), I didn’t live in a charming small town where everything was somehow available — and yet I am obsessed with it. Lorelai was, and will always be, my hero. And Team Jess forever.
Rating: 5/5 (for the first 5 seasons), 3/5 (for the last two), Streaming on Netflix
Shahana’s take: Same thing I said above. It feels like the kind of show I would’ve absolutely loved if I’d watched it when I was younger, and then revisited as an adult. If I can find the time, I would perhaps watch this just so I can be part of the conversation or find out why Rory is supposedly whiny according to Tumblr?
p.s. I’m friends with Kashika, I am certain she has at least 7 men vying for her attention at all times.
Iss Pyaar Ko Kya Naam Doon (2011-2012)
“Tum theek ho?”
It always comes as a shock to people when they find out that I love Hindi daily soaps. “Oh, it’s your guilty pleasure?” they ask. It’s not. It’s my straight-up pleasure. This is not to say that all, or too many, Hindi shows are worth your while, but if you ever want to invest in just one, to see why I’m so in love with them, watch IPKKND. This is a show that ended when it was at its peak because the lead actor quit, and while everyone at the time hated him for doing this, he did us a giant favour. The central problem of all Hindi soaps is that they’re endless, but because IPKKND ended in ‘just’ 200-odd episodes, it did not get a chance to become insipid and insufferable. The story of Arnav and Khushi, star-crossed lovers who end up in a hate marriage (where two people who hate each other get married for REASONS), is a tale as old as time. Rich, hot, secretly sweet asshole meets a chirpy, irritatingly-naive girl from a humble background who rubs him the wrong way but haunts his dreams. They bicker all the time while we have to look away from the screen because of all the sexual tension. The girl almost faints every time their fingers so much as touch. Misunderstandings happen, they hate each other, they end up getting married, they sleep on the same bed, they wake up entangled in each other, they fall in love, they defeat the bad guys. That is literally every love story ever written for Indian television, but it is so well told and the two leads are so sickeningly in love with each other, that it’s gone down in Indian TV history as one of the greatest hits.
Rating: 4/5, Streaming on Disney+ Hotstar
Shahana’s take: Let me confess something. Sometimes, because Kashika is a fabulous storyteller, I make her come up with fanfics of what our lives could be. She obliges because as a great friend, she supports and enables her unhinged friend, and she once mentioned a hate marriage. Friends, I have not been able to get it out of my mind. I want to watch this show only to understand what the hell a hate marriage is and how two people end up in one.
Goblin The Lonely And Great God 쓸쓸하고 찬란하신 – 도깨비 (2016)
“You asked me to remember only my happy moments, but you asked me to forget you. That's a contradiction. Every moment that you were in, even all the sadness and hardship, all of it made me happy.”
I wanted to put one K-drama on this list, and picking that one show became the hardest part of writing this issue. But the winner is, of course, Goblin, a show that is old-timey in parts (that I always forward through), but is ultimately a story so well told and so heartbreaking that I cried for three days after finishing it. Kim Shin, an immortal God, is looking for his human wife who can end his misery and his life. But when he finds her in a high school human woman (I know, just try to move past this), he realises it’s not that easy. He is also besties with Korean Yamraj, my favourite character of all time, who himself has an arc so tragic that I now have to go lie down. His chemistry with the second female lead was, in fact, so electric that they made an entirely different show with the two of them as the central characters (Touch Your Heart, a very fluffy and easy watch). This is fantasy, romance, and tragedy at its absolute best, so please watch it and try not to skip the historical parts because that’s where you understand whatever the fuck is going on in present times.
Rating: 4/5, Streaming on Netflix
Shahana’s take: Kashika is the sole reason I’m obsessed with Korean television now. Her essay on It’s Okay To Not Be Okay set me on a journey there is absolutely no looking back from. I do have to say, I do not understand how Kashika manages to forward through large parts of Korean shows and still somehow get what’s going on? Either way, I’m already sold.
Honourable mentions
Strong Woman Do Bong-soon
It’s Okay To Not Be Okay
Schitt’s Creek
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